“WINGS”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 423, 3 August 1928, Page 14

“WINGS”

EPIC AERIAL BATTLES FILMED Private View This Morning A PRIVATE screening was given this morning in the Paramount Film Company’s office of the picture “Wings,” a film that can only be described as an international epic of the war. “Wings” is not only a story that reaches the heart, but it marks a new era in film-making with the crashing of planes and aerial fighting that has never before been brought to the screen.

Aviation is at all times fascinating, but never more so than in this story of the gallant and unsung heroes of the Great War —the flyers of all nations who piloted their machines to almost certain death. The war in the air had never before been filmed, and “Wings” fills a unique and important gap in the records of the war. Let it be said at the outset, however, that although “Wings” was made in the United States it is not like the usual American war picture. The Americans do not appear as supermen, and neither the Allies nor tlie enemy are lampooned or distorted. There is an international broadness that makes “Wings” a big picture in every sense of the word. We see the work the Kingsford Smiths, the Lindberghs, and the Byrds would have to do were the air a battleground.

will never return. We see also the propeller swinging slower and slower in time with the heart-beats of a lad who did not need his mascot any more. Faithfully and movingly “Wings” shows us over the battleground, but it is chiefly in the air that the picture makes ttlm history. Some of those doings up aloft, photographed no one knows how, will bring horror to the heart of the most heartened moviegoer. And the story? It tells of two young aviators who loved the same vivacious little girl, and who know that the first to get home would win her. But they play fair. The tremendous climax of the picture comes when one of the boys is shot down, and the other, watching his pal’s plane dropping, lower and lower, vows to avenge him. In an air fight that makes one fairly grip the seat, he destroys an enemy squadron and is just returning when he sees a solitary enemy plane. He fatally wounds the pilot, not hearing the agonised cry of "Jack, don’t you know me?”—for it was his pal who had managed to escape in an enemy plane.

We see again what we saw “over there,” the fights between planes, the reviled “archies” in action, the graves madked by broken “props,” and the home folk seeing us off, and welcoming us back, or waiting for those who